cat9

As far as dates go, did they use Certified Mail or a similar service? Does the postmark agree with their date or yours? Writing a date on the letter doesn't prove anything about when they sent it.

If it's a scam an not incompetence, a letter from a lawyer will probably shut them up quickly. Litigation usually isn't acquired, you're switching their opponent from a consumer they think they can scam to a professional they know they can't.

Having links on the site fail arbitrarily devalues the entire page. Users aren't stopping and thinking "hey, is clicking this link going to waste my time?" - which results in the entire system being perceived as less reliable and trustworthy.

I agree that such discussions are off-topic, but is there a better way to handle these articles than "RTFM, noob"?

It sucks to have to change your stance after the fact. There will probably be vocal opposition to doing so. But your odds of still being in business three years from now just shot up.

Figuring out which people and when is, generically, a matter of doing your homework with customer development and targeted marketing, and then further improving your marketing surface as you learn more about who is a customer and how to find them.

Going from "this might be useful" to a working business model is, of course, a deeply nontrivial problem...but it's one that many people have solved before, and it's a heck of a lot easier if you don't start with "maybe $25 per year."

Your rates should not be pinned to a lowball bid for an annual salary for a newly minted CS student. You're assuming far more risk, and hang around just long enough to deliver major value and get out, rather than being just productive enough that it's not worthwhile to hire someone to replace you.

You need to operate like a business that is delivering a high-value service in exchange for a reasonable fee. And you should probably narrow down your offering & marketing to the point that you have very few direct competitors, and practically none once you account for location and availability.

If you can constructively and reliably ship code to prod, you almost certainly have better immediate options than Elance.

Worst case, calling ten different web agencies in your area will probably get you enough work to pay the bills, likely at rates which are not unreasonable, and with far less pathological clients than you'd find on Elance. You might have to call another ten after that, if your luck is bad or if your sales skills are poor.

After that, what? Full-time job? Freelancing? Another startup? Get out of software and into the exciting world of fruit vending?

It's a wide world and you have skills that are in high demand. What do you want the next chapter in your life to be about?

If transaction time is important, hard drives are high bandwidth. Ten 1TB hard drives are $500. Two 6TB hard drives are also $500, but you have fewer drives to worry about shipping. Five 2TB hard drives are about $370, if drive price is more important. Using ten 1TB drives is only best if we're optimizing for load / unload time and have that degree of parallelism in the pipeline. Otherwise, one of the other two will be better, depending on price sensitivity vs. other factors.

If it's not as time-sensitive, something like BitTorrent Sync will get the job done. This doesn't require shipments, additional hardware, or mucking about with hardware at either end, so it's very nice if "get it there ASAP" isn't a constraint.

Regardless, don't ship the only copy.

https://github.com/Sirupsen/logrus

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7850335

In general, I would avoid selling software without a service agreement.

Bugs are a thing that happens. You will endeavor to make them happen less, because you're a competent professional. But because you're a competent professional, you know that some will happen anyway. So structure your business deals such that both you and your customer have a good answer to the problem. You shouldn't take a wash for being available, and they shouldn't be left hanging with nobody to get help from.

This gives you a tidy source of recurring revenue and an easy way to nudge up your average deal value. It gives your customers a reliable source for fixes and changes. It's good business all around.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AGA6eJXZAOw

The ability to pick up saccades could have interesting HCI implications if the signal is consistent.

This breaks down the second you encounter, for example: Fourier transforms, wave equations, or hyperbolic geometry. Physicists are trying to understand the world, which in many cases does not comport itself in a way which is considerate of our naive intuition about mechanics and geometry.

The nth dimensional component of a vector still has a specific meaning within the context of the parent model, but it's far easier if you stop trying to force that and learn to deal with vectors as vectors instead. This allows for abstractions which are portable between the very many places where vectors are useful, instead of trying to force each value to fit an ad hoc cognitive model, with whatever flaws and conceptual limits that it introduces.

https://ant0ine.github.io/go-json-rest/

Gorilla is useful, but more for its range of standalone components than as a framework.

https://github.com/gorilla

Then you'll want database-related packages like redigo and gorp.

https://github.com/garyburd/redigo

https://github.com/go-gorp/gorp

(Which is exactly the value point I'd be working to improve if I was working at Steam and trying to convince more titles to release there.)

But for the vast majority of startups, this is not something you should be worrying about early on. Let the lawyers sort it out later during due diligence. Worry about getting customers first. You should consult your legal counsel (rather than the internet) about your specific case, but in general...build the damn thing and start selling it, instead of looking for excuses not to.

Learn to tell people no while being both firm and polite about it.

But the reality is that the above is almost never what happens, even when the task required is limited to strictly marketing / sales / engineering, rather than requiring some combination of the above to be executed simultaneously and well.

If you can walk in, talk to each of the different groups involved, understand their separate needs, design a mutually acceptable solution, and then get the thing to actually be done - that is absurdly valuable, and you should bill accordingly.

Solve that, and you have much more traction to complain about what people should or shouldn't be doing.

Flask. Check out the docs, it's about as simple and pythonic as it's possible for "respond to this URL by executing that python function" to be.

http://flask.pocoo.org

Talking to relational databases is mostly handled through Flask-SQLAlchemy, which isn't much more complicated to get started with, but SQLAlchemy is very open-ceiling in terms of power and utility.

http://flask-sqlalchemy.pocoo.org/2.0/

Miguel Grinberg's tutorial is solid for a broader view of common app features, and will likely cover more than you'll need any time soon.

http://blog.miguelgrinberg.com/post/the-flask-mega-tutorial-...

If you want to integrate JavaScript stuff, whether full apps or jQuery or D3.js or what have you, worry about that later - it might not be necessary, but it's fairly easy to bolt on if needed.

---------

JavaScript & CSS assets:

I use Gulp, which is a JavaScript build tool, to build my JavaScript & CSS assets. This isn't something you can pip and done, but it's probably worth the effort if you get to the point of having extensive JavaScript & CSS files. If that sounds like a hassle, use Flask-Assets.

Why? The JavaScript tools for dealing with JavaScript are much less of a hassle, and for whatever reason they also tend to have less fussy CSS asset builders. But this is mostly a "set up the script once & forget about it outside of letting it run" problem, so it's not really a hassle to use in place of native tools.

Re: Image 2, http://i.imgur.com/541uG5t.png

Cultivate healthy paranoia that systems will fail - because eventually, they will, particularly if you run 100 of them or run them for several years or any other "you have to survive 1000 coin tosses to miss the error" combinatoric series. And always make a backup before doing system-changing events like resizing a partition or reprovisioning a VM.

Fair warning: this is probably indicative of their overall experience level at running a business & a team, which may tell you a few things about the ride you'll be in for with them (as opposed to any of the numerous other places in Seattle which would be happy to take you).

When you hit "sheepish grin"...go up another two steps. Then practice saying it with a straight face. This is probably closer to your actual market value.

Yes. Also your English is fine, assuming this is a representative sample.

> considering the present reality of code-on-whiteboard sort of interviews for a stable job in the major software companies

My advice here is that it's a coder's market and you can mostly redirect these into other methods of demonstrating your competency, or if nothing else - iterate over several companies until you find one with more realistic methods.

> What do you think about passive income, say, from selling WordPress themes on themeforest, or something similar?

"Passive" income is mostly a misnomer. It's more a matter of, "I have a mostly post-development product, which occasionally requires maintenance, and the active portion of monetizing it is now more a matter of sales and marketing, versus engineering."

More generally:

The set of companies hiring or expecting to hire software engineers is approximately, "all companies which presently employ software engineers." The set of companies which can benefit from software engineering is approximately, "all companies with meaningful revenue."

The part that remains is for you to find them and convince them that particular things you can do with code will predictably lead to them having more revenue. This is easier if you specialize in a particular type of company and problem, because you can build up knowledge around what problems they have, how they currently deal with them, how they talk about them, and what sales and marketing approaches they're most receptive to.

This applies whether you want to be an employee, or sell a product, or provide consulting services, or whatever. Find people who have problems, convince them that you can provide solutions in a way which is predictably revenue-positive and which doesn't unduly increase the burden to them.

You might end up bouncing off a few more HR firewalls, but those are mostly not the places you would be happy working anyway. Your goal in finding new gigs is mostly to bypass HR until they've been given an instruction to walk you through your hiring paperwork.